James Blake Is Fed Up With Instagram “Bottlenecking” His Show Promo
While continuing to release new music like his spring single “Thrown Around,” James Blake has also been airing out his concerns about the music industry this year. In March he sounded off about low royalty payments in the streaming era, which led to his involvement with a new direct-to-fan platform called Vault. Now he’s set his sights on social media and the other massive companies that maintain control over data.
In the caption to an Instagram post, Blake cautions that these are “scattered thoughts on a big topic.” He laments that he’s experiencing “crazy bottlenecking” on his posts promoting upcoming performances, such as “3000 views on a story when I have 691,000 followers.” He notes that social media companies, record labels, promoters, and other large companies own his fans’ contact info and other data, pointing readers to a link to his Vault page, where they can sign up for a mailing list directly from him. He also returns to the much-discussed subject of concert ticket prices and fees, explaining that he’s doing his upcoming solo piano gigs on a platform called bside. “When streaming decimated artists income from music we all said oh I guess we’ve still got live music, that’s how we’ll sustain ourselves and give the music away virtually free to promote the shows,'” Blake writes. “Well now a different set of vampires has done it with live music as well and with this the fans suffer even more. When somebody asks me how to get into a career in music my answer cannot be become a content creator and sell products. I refuse.”
Here’s his full message:
If you are a fan and you wanna see me perform, please sign up for free at the link in bio cause otherwise you might never hear about any of my shows. I’m not going through the monopolies any more. I’m not having my fans and myself be ripped off by people who don’t care the way we do about live music. They own all of our mailing lists and won’t let us use them to reach our fans and now this app is restricting all my posts about shows, I don’t have any other way of letting you know.
Are any of you actually seeing these posts about shows I’m putting on? I’m seeing crazy bottlenecking. 3000 views on a story when I have 691,000 followers.. grid posts reaching hardly anyone.. why can’t I promote a show to people who follow me? How else am I supposed to let people know I’m playing?
That’s why all of these upcoming piano shows are on a new platform I’m working with – bside
Every show l’ve ever done for 13 years a company has taken the data – I.e email addresses/phone numbers of my fans. I didn’t know how important that was at the time. My IG was reaching more people than it does now because algorithm bottlenecking. And in the meantime those companies have built huge piles of data to be able to market other shows or anything else, to our fans, and all the musicians who weren’t savvy to what was going on, are now struggling to get the word out about their shows or records. @bside.show gives that data to the musician so they can reach their fans.I refuse to subject my fans to the ridiculous amounts of unexplainable hidden fees they have to pay to come see me live.
It’s not just the ones you see at checkout. There are more than we even know about, buried in countless deals we artists never see, padding out the bill you pay and making touring too expensive for upcoming artists. I’m sick of the control over every single aspect of the live experience meaning that means everyone who actually works on the show can be squeezed until a career in live music being a rigger, tech, sound, lighting, producer, tour manager, all of the amazing people who make it possible for us to be in a room together playing live music safely, is harder and harder to justify as a career path.
For so long artists and fans have been kept in separate rooms, and prevented from talking to each other about how bad it’s been getting. I wanna be in the same room as you, figuratively and literally.
And while they kept us in different rooms they were robbing you and robbing the artists. I know huge artists who’ve been on tour for two years and made a LOSS on touring. They have to rely on branding deals or literally anything else to keep going. And that’s super established artists! How the hell is a new band supposed to afford to tour… have you noticed there aren’t as many bands around btw?
When streaming decimated artists income from music we all said oh I guess we’ve still got live music, that’s how we’ll sustain ourselves and give the music away virtually free to promote the shows’. Well now a different set of vampires has done it with live music as well and with this the fans suffer even more. When somebody asks me how to get into a career in music my answer cannot be become a content creator and sell products. I refuse.
To all artists out there – the humble mailing list is your way out of this. I love you.
